Twitter duolingo8/22/2023 He was once a dog walker for the Czech art collector Meda Mládková, the widow of an International Monetary Fund governor. On days when there aren’t carpets to clean, he helps a friend tint office building windows. His friends encouraged him to start a YouTube channel, but after a bout of depression, he stopped filming. Vaughn has been a painter, a bouncer, a punk rock roadie and a Kombucha delivery man. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)Īnd so began an adulthood marked by jobs that came and went. Vaughn Smith prepares the grill for dinner with a group of friends and Washington Post journalists in the backyard of his home in Gaithersburg, Md., where he lives with his mother. “Once that happened, I just gave up on the idea, and that was the very end of it,” Vaughn remembers. A counselor encouraged him to apply to a trade school for medical assistants, but he didn’t get in. His high school diploma would be the last he’d receive. Vaughn tested into the highest-level Russian class at his new school, despite never taking classes before. In an environment where he never felt like he fit, he was connecting in a way that no one else could.īut by 17, his mom had moved him back to Maryland. When he returned to school, he had even more to say, and more that he could understand. The way Vaughn describes it, any time he reads something in a book, he can remember it almost perfectly. Memorial Library, which he’d discovered had the city’s best selection of language books. On the weekends, he took the bus downtown to the Martin Luther King Jr. When he noticed a shy Ethiopian girl, he asked her to teach him Amharic. , and watch as Vaughn memorized them all. He befriended a brother and sister who would write him lists of phrases in Romanian. There was a clique of Brazilian students, so he started to learn Portuguese.
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